Yazdani Bakery, an Irani cafe in Mumbai was opened by Meherwan Zend in 1953. He was a Parsi baker. And the building was originally a Japanese bank, but then was sold off. It is run by the third generation now and has about it, a certain quaintness. Like all Irani cafes, it seems to lack maintenance and things just seem to lie about, like they always did! I don’t personally know why, but sometimes this adds to the atmosphere… and in Irani cafes, it most definitely makes the nostalgia come alive!
The crowds love the food they serve here… and they have a consistency, that probably is one of their biggest selling points… and guess, they couldn’t care less about decor. Almost the opposite of what we see in new-age restaurants!
At Yazdani, all the products are handmade… and in traditional ovens. they make bread, bruns, pav, khari (a kind of puffy biscuit). The founder of this institution Mr Zend, was a boxer! And even took part in some boxing competitions. Check out his pictures in the cafe if you choose to visit!
But before I go any further, let me explain what brun-maska or pav-maska is… to a non-Mumbaikar, it might seem like gibberish! It’s a piece of bread – like a bun – cut down the middle and then slathered, stuffed, artery-cloggingly with salted butter! Some of the butter melts, and seeps into the pores of the well-risen bun, the rest stays in the middle. And it comes together with a cup of Suleimani or Irani chai. Suleimani chai is black tea with sugar, and if you want, a dash of lime. Irani tea is sweet, milk chai. I stood at the preparation table and observed the servers go about getting a brun-maska ready.
Lines of buns and pav waited to be smacked and slathered with butter…I shuddered and at the same time drooled over the amount of butter he took on his knife as he went about evenly coating the bun’s middles! There were stacks of 500 gm packs of butter, cover removed, just sitting in their butter paper. I doubt if I have seen that much butter in my life! Next to that, trays of brun, pav at different degrees of warmth – from just out of the oven to warm enough to melt the butter… I leave with my tummy full of a brun-maska, one pav-maska and half a Sulaimani chai and a bag of ‘khari’ biscuits to munch over at my chai break at office.
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For more pics..click here http://merrytogoaround.com/2013/08/09/irani-cafes-of-mumbai-yazdani-bakery-fort/
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Bhavani Ramesh is a traveler by choice, photographer by interest and writer by desire. She works at audiocompass.in. She blogs at merrytogoaround.com and tweets @bhavan1.